> > >Mat, > >I did read the licenses themselves, I believe I understand them, somewhat. >What I don't understand is the idea that Biojava is distributed under the >LGPL so that it's not under the LGPL. Is this what the Biojava authors >actually want to say? It looks like a typo. Is there a third kind of GPL >license? > > > I think you misread what was stated:
"BioJava is distributed under LGPL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html>. This means that you can use the libraries without your software being forced under either the LGPL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html> or GPL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>." BioJava is distributed under the LGPL. The software that you or anybody else writes does not have to be released under the GPL or LGPL. This means that if write software that uses BioJava, you do not have to provide your source code and you can charge a fee for use (not just distribution) of the software. I would imagine that the founders of BioJava opted for the LGPL for the reasons stated in this article, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html: "Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other. Using the ordinary GPL for a library gives free software developers an advantage over proprietary developers: a library that they can use, while proprietary developers cannot use it. Using the ordinary GPL is not advantageous for every library. There are reasons that can make it better to use the Library GPL in certain cases. The most common case is when a free library's features are readily available for proprietary software through other alternative libraries. In that case, the library cannot give free software any particular advantage, so it is better to use the Library GPL for that library. This is why we used the Library GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another--no problem for them, only for us." I don't know how many prorietary packages that are out there that have similar functionality but it seems like the LGPL would be the best way to get BioJava accepted by a large amount of people. Dave _______________________________________________ Biojava-l mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://biojava.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-l
